Retirement Insights

A Guide to a Conservative Return Assumption

By Wade Pfau, Ph.D., CFA, RICP®

A simple approach for building a financial plan is to decide on a rate of return for the investment portfolio and to plug that value into a spreadsheet to represent assumed asset growth. Historical data may be used to calculate historical average retur…

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Planning For The Future – What About Bond Yields?

By Wade Pfau, Ph.D., CFA, RICP®

Adjustments for Current Bond Yields An important consideration is that current interest rates are lower than the historical averages. The historical average return is not relevant for someone seeking to estimate future market returns from today’s start…

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Unpacking Today’s Market Return

By Bob French, CFA

Today, March 9th, 2020, was a bad day for the market returns. There are four main elements to this story that I want to pick apart…

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Inflation, Deflation, Confiscation & Devastation- The Four Horsemen Of Risk

By Wade Pfau, Ph.D., CFA, RICP®

Noted financial advisor and historian William Bernstein makes a compelling case for stocks in his e-book Deep Risk: How History Informs Portfolio Design. In the introduction, Bernstein begins by offering an operational definition of risk. Risk is the s…

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Lessons for the Next Crisis

By Alex Murguia, PhD

We wrote this in 2017 and it remains just as relevant today. In early October 2007, the S&P 500 Index hit what was its highest point before losing more than half its value over the next year and a half during the global financial crisis. Over the coming weeks and months, as other anniversaries of…

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The Coronavirus and Your Investments

By Bob French, CFA

The Coronavirus is scary. Aside from the reasonable health precautions that you should be taking, what should you be doing to protect your investments from the disruptions that the Coronavirus may cause?

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Are Stocks Safer in the Long-Term?

By Bob French, CFA

When you’re investing, you need to focus on the long-term. This is one of those pieces of received wisdom that everyone has heard, and most people at least pretend to believe it, but it’s often wildly misinterpreted. There’s this idea out there that stocks get safer the longer you hold onto them because you can…

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2019 – Q4 Quarterly Market Review

By Paula Friedman, CFP®, AIF®, CPFA

This report features world capital market performance and a timeline of events for the last quarter. It begins with a global overview, then features the returns of stock and bond asset classes in the US and international markets. The report also illustrates the performance of globally diversified portfolios and features a topic of the quarter.…

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The Secure Act and Your Retirement

By Kyle Meyer

At the end of last year, Congress passed a bipartisan spending bill. Included in this bill is the Setting Every Community Up for Retirement Enhancement Act, also known as the SECURE Act. The provisions of the SECURE Act are effective 1/1/2020 and will have real-world implications for your retirement and legacy planning. In this article,…

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